How to get a “Sun X2100 M2″ server, configured with SATA drives, to work with VMWare ESX 3.5!

To get a “Sun X2100 M2″ server, configured with SATA drives, to work with VMWare ESX 3.5, perform
the following steps:

(1) Install ESX 3.5 off the CD (or via KickStart) as you normally would (i.e. as if SATA controllers were fully
supported). This approach works because the kernel/ramdisk image pair used during the install phase are
derived from Red Hat’s Anaconda installer, and thus support for most SATA controllers are available at
ESX 3.5 install time.

(2) When the installation is complete and you initiate the reboot, select the “Service Console only
(troubleshooting mode)” menu option to boot from. That too, uses a kernel/ramdisk pair that supports
SATA controllers/drives, and will allow the mounting of the ESX 3.5 root filesystem, which we need to access
in order to tweak a configuration file (to get ESX 3.5 to recognize the Sun X2100 M2 SATA drives at
*boot time*). So… Once booted to that mode, perform the following post-install steps (manually or, if
using kickstart, programmatically with a finish script):

root# cp /etc/vmware/pciid/sata_nv.xml /etc/vmware/pciid/sata_nv.xml.FCS
root# vi /etc/vmware/pciid/sata_nv.xml

Insert the following stanza in between the last and XML tags at the bottom
of the file:

root# esxcfg-pciid

root# reboot

(3) Boot to ESX 3.5 as normal. It will work.